- Luckin Coffee is punishing staff by making them copy lines of customer complaints, Jiupai News reported.
- The news went viral with social media users discussing whether the punishment is appropriate.
- A Luckin customer service rep told the outlet the punishment aimed to encourage staff to read customers' notes.
From demanding customers to complicated custom coffee orders baristas have a lot to deal with.
In China, the work's harder.
Luckin Coffee — a chain seen as a rival to Starbucks in China — is forcing employees to write out lines of customer complaints if they get their orders wrong, Jiupai News, a Hubei-based Chinese Communist Party-affiliated outlet reported on April 20.
The outlet also posted a screenshot of one employee's copying task which appeared to show multiple lines of the same text written over two pages.
"I said I wanted a hot coffee in the note, did you not see it? Have you not woken up?" had been written out over 40 times, per Jiupai News.
Staff members were made to repeatedly write "Unsweetened jasmine tea is totally undrinkable" and "I ordered less ice, why did you give me more ice?" Jiupai News reported, citing posts made by the coffee chain's staff on unnamed social media platforms.
Jiupai News' report alone garnered nearly 1,600 responses on the outlet's website. The top comment blasting this punishment for being "unacceptable" and humiliating garnered nearly 2,600 likes.
The story also went viral on Chinese microblogging website Weibo, with social media users debating whether the punishment was appropriate.
"Isn't this a waste of time? The staff can't make coffee when he is copying, so his coworkers will be busier," one Weibo microblog user commented in response to a post of the news that got nearly 9,500 likes.
"Is this meaningful? Punishing adults with copying lines is humiliating," read another response to the post.
But some commentators seemed to support the punishments.
One Weibo user commented that the penalty was too light and that the errant staff should be added to an industry blacklist. This comment garnered over 500 likes.
Luckin Coffee did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. A Luckin customer service staff told Jiupai News in April that it often receives customer complaints about wrong orders and the punishment was being administered so that staff does not forget to read customers' notes.
News of its unusual employee punishments comes three years after Luckin was delisted from the Nasdaq exchange following a $300 million accounting fraud. Despite that, the coffee chain continued to expand and has plans to return to the US stock market, the Financial Times reported in January 2022.
Luckin said last year it's the biggest coffee chain in China. It now has over 9,000 stores in China — higher than Starbucks' 6,000 stores.